Influenced by the painting of an old master Italian Artist – Giuseppe Arcimboldo (An Artist that painted fruits and vegetables to creative people’s portraits), I made this painting “Portrait of an Artist” as a tribute to one of my art teachers, Jim Meaders. After 30 years, I thought of this teacher and all the help he rendered to me while he was studying in America. I picked up my photo album and looking through the pages, saw Jim Meaders picture in academic gown that I took during the graduation in 1984. I imagined Jim’s bushy hair as brush head and I decided to re-do the painting that I did as class work in 1984 in honour of Jim Meaders. Jim Meaders is a Painter and as in many of my recent paintings, I like to use my paintings to make a statement. I am using this painting to tell the viewer the occupation of his subject. To start the painting, I sketched my subject profile first on tracing paper and then arranged the artist’s tools to form the shape of the profile. I carefully assembled brushes of different sizes and shapes to makes up the bushy hair of the head and the face, Paint tube and a pencil that overlapped together to make various anatomical shapes of an Artist’s face. Brushes for the hairy parts of the face, a pencil for the nose and a paint tube for the mouth of the portrait.
After the concept was formed on paper, I started to use the image on paper to guide me to do final sketch on canvas. My choice of medium for this work is oil on canvas and I started applying paints on the image already sketched on the canvas. I kept making changes as the painting progressed to afford any gap as I exchanged round brushes for flat brushes in the area of the mouth and a pointed brushes for the area of the moustache of the painting.